The first is an older ASUS desktop running Puppy 4.3.2 test v3 and using an Nvidia graphics card. Wine ver 1.28.1

The second is an IBM Thinkpad T43 using an ATI Radeon X300 board and running MU's NewyearsPup rc10. Wine ver 1.3.17

The key to running Sketchup, as well as many other graphics intensive Windows CAD applications, is to use the proprietary graphics drivers provided by your graphics board manufacturer. Before I understood that ,I was unsuccessful with most of these apps.

Nvidia provides an installer which you run after adding devx and kernel source to your Puppy installation. Running the installer is pretty easy, and it compiles a driver suited to the kernel of puppy you are using.

For my Thinkpad ATI Radeon board, I found a driver .pet for my specific board created by MU -- the ATI Catalyst 9.3 version. Most other .pet versions did not include my board. Unfortunately the 9.3 Catalyst .pet runs on very few puplet kernel versions, but I found MU's NewYearsPup was set upfor it.

It would be great if a standard Barry Kauler puppy 4 version could run the Catalyst 9.3 video drivers, and I'd love to hear from anyone who has been successful in working that out. I prefer the old meat and potatoes standard puppies for everyday use.

I just got both of these up and runningwith Sketchup, and will add what I find in subsequent posts.

There are many plugins available for the free version of sketchup which make it much more useful for design work. These include workarounds for the file save function to allow pdf output, flattening and unfolding functions, tensile structure design,G-code output, etc. Sketchup accepts Ruby scripts, as plugins, so there is a big world out there of extensions.

Wow thanks indeed. I want to learn this for to be able to show some naive design for funny "bikes" as I do now I take a photo of a pencil drawing with the mobile and that is not so practical. So if Schetchy can do bikes that would be cool._________________I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

Nooby, it can do bikes for sure. There are concept cars, radio controlled airplane models, architecture, boats -- basically anything you need to surface model.

One thing I've found so far is that I need to start it from a terminal in the folder where the program resides. So cd to that folder first in terminal, then run the SketchUp.exe program.

I'm also running an earlier version (7) than the latest version 8. I have heard that the earlier version may be easier to run some of the extensions people have made for it.

Possibly Google is moving towards tightening control of the free version. The pro version is $495, but many of the limitations of the free version can be overcome with plugins available on the net.

One source of very good information on using Sketchup in 3D design, flattening out components and adding and using extensions are on model airplane building forums. This one is a very useful thread, I've found:

I can't install Google Sketchup in my puppy 5.28 installtion.
I have installed nVidia drivers.
I tried Sketchup 8 and 7.
At both, installation ends with message:
'Unable to satisfy all prerequisites for Google Sketchup. Setup cannot continue until all system components have been successfuly installed.'

I've just tried Sketchup7.1 in LUPU 5.28 v.5 and using Wine-1.3.13-Lucid52on the Thinkpad T43. I have finally got it to work, and this is the first time since I used NewYearsPup as an OS. Glad to have achieved it but there are some drawbacks.

First, here's what I had to do to get it to work:

1.) Changed to the Sketchup installer directory and open a terminal there (this was essential to installing successfully).

2.) Entered "wine sketchup.exe"

3.) Program installed.

When I first tried Sketchup however, the program opened fine but the drawing screen remained black. All of the tools seemed to work and all of the toolbars were there, and the program seemed active -- I just couldn't see any work.

After some research on the web I found a number of ATI and Intel graphics card users were only successful AFTER editing the xorg.conf file and explicitely turning off DRI.

Formerly, Nvidia users were successful if they ran proprietary graphics drivers. And Sketchup was also well supported by newer ATI drivers, but not current drivers for my older Thinkpad ATI chip.

An older ATI proprietary driver did work on specific early kernels -- in fact that's why I had to formerly use MU's older puplet "NewYearsPup". But that was the only puplet it worked on

I have been wanting to upgrade to a newer puppy for a long time but didn't want to give up Sketchup, which I use regularly.

Now with DRI disabled in Lupu 5.28, Sketchup works, and GLX still remains -- I found I could run the command glxgears, but at a drastically reduced framerate (about 1/5 of what it had been). Nevertheless, Skethchup could now be run and everything was visible.

I'm wondering if there is a newer verison of DRI under LUPU that might work with Sketchup. It would be very helpful to be able to run DRI and Puppy at a good frame rate and yet retain Sketchup functionality.

The main requirement is to make sure your graphics card or chips has a good linux or proprietary driver, or if not, that you disable DRI in your X config.

GLX is essential though. If you can run glxgears from a terminal, chances are you can run Sketchup -- at least version 7. And that one is very well supported with free third party plugins and tools, including CAM, which I'm interested in.

This week I tested 5 late kernel Puppy distros for Sketchup compatibility.

On this machine Racy53 ran Sketchup graphics far faster than Lupu 528, Sulu, Upup Precise, and 3HeadedDog. Racy will therefore become the day-to-day OS for this machine.

Testing was done on all with Wine 1.52 (full) and the best Xorg/proprietary drivers available for this machine in that distro. Racy did not require any special drivers but ran SketchUp out of the box at high speed.._________________Acer Aspire 5349-2635 laptop dual proc, 4gb ram, frugal Tahrpup.
1999 Thinkpad 600e hacked Pent 3, overclocked 800 mHz, 490 kb running Lupu 528
Acer Iconia A1-830 Atom x86 Android tablet
www.sredmond.comLast edited by vtpup on Mon 30 Apr 2012, 22:21; edited 1 time in total

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forumYou cannot attach files in this forumYou can download files in this forum